


Medicine Smile, Murderous Soul

by prouvairablehulk



Series: Better To Reign [1]
Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Demons AU, F/F, M/M, Modern Gothic au, everybody's a little bit evil, there's a 24 hour diner involved
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-10
Updated: 2016-04-10
Packaged: 2018-06-01 11:49:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6517495
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prouvairablehulk/pseuds/prouvairablehulk
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There’s a diner in Central, and when you open the door, you step into the realm of demons.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Medicine Smile, Murderous Soul

**Author's Note:**

> The first two songs by these guys (https://soundcloud.com/daniel-eisler) were performed at the gig I went to last night, and totally inspired this. Then Joker gave me prompts to help with the plot, and this happened.

Fifty years ago, Central would have been called a one-horse town. Apparently the modern equivalent is “one-Starbucks” (not that they have a Starbucks). 

Rather, Central has a diner. It’s a tiny truckstop style place that remains open 24 hours despite the fact that the town goes dead at 11pm, and offers breakfast for every one of those 24 long hours. Lisa Snart would know just how long those hours are, because Lisa Snart works nearly all of them. The Snarts have owned the diner for years upon years, to the point that no one remembers a time when a Snart wasn’t running the diner. Lisa and her brother, Lenny, took over as soon as Lisa’s mom blew out of town when Lenny was fifteen and enough of a delinquent that Sheriff Lance knew the Snart home phone number by heart. Lisa had been 6, and she still wasn’t sure if her mom had left in the driver’s seat of the missing ’92 mustang, or in the trunk of it with her father behind the wheel. 

Not that anyone would ask questions – they never did, when it came to the Snarts, because her father worked for the Sheriff, and that made him a good, upstanding citizen as far as anyone was concerned, regardless of the broken-bottle scars on Lisa’s shoulders and the purple-blue that stains Lenny’s face and ribs when the two of them can’t get out of the way quickly enough. Lisa, at seventeen, is sure that she will be refilling coffee and delivering eggs benedict until her father finally snuffs it, and she and Lenny can run without being picked up by flashing lights two towns over. 

Lisa Snart, at twenty-seven, will rule that shithole of a town, and many more besides. 

***

Len Snart (no one calls him Lenny but his kid sister, and Leo – Leo’s not an option any more) has always loathed his father’s insistence that the diner stay open 24-hours. It’s not like anyone comes it – there are no nightclubs in Central, no bars to turn out revelers seeking grease, a very limited number of rebellious teenagers (most of whom stick to raiding the liquor cabinet at the Queen Mansion with the oldest kid there, drinking up a solid portion of an age-old plantation fortune). There’s no truck company that leaves long haul drivers stranded, there’s not even a biker gang to show up in roaring style at 1 am. Or rather, there never has been. 

The man strolls in with a kind of casual swagger that suggests he already knows just how physically intimidating he is, like he knows they way that the heavy canvas jacket does nothing to mask the breadth of his shoulders, that the faded grey Henley only emphasizes the chiseled lines of his chest, that the scars just visible above his collar and his shaved head give him the sense of something manic. His clothes are streaked with soot, and he’s still toying with a silver zippo lighter. Lisa sat him in the corner closest to the kitchen, and then went into the back room to wash dishes, leaving Len to handle their guest. 

The zippo flips on. The man hovers his hand over it, closest to the blue of the flame. The zippo flips off. He takes a sip of the coffee Len had poured him. The zippo flips on. Len takes a breath, and goes to the chipped Formica booth to ask him what he wants. While Len stares resolutely at the floor rather than at the man, or his formidable biceps, he can see that the man’s boots are caked in red dust, only redder in the flickering neon of the diner. 

“Are you on the menu?” asks the man, in a voice like gravel and whiskey and bad decisions by the crossroads at midnight. 

Len’s father would be horrified, and probably fabricate an offense so he could drag the man out of the diner and out of the township. The minute the stranger took his jacket off, cold had started to seep its way into Len’s internal monologue, because there was no way Len could deny the tug in his gut once those biceps were out in the open, and his Father goes after Lisa whenever he catches Len in that kind of situation (which adds up to Len not having been in a situation like that for a very long time). By Lewis’s fucked up logic, a gay son would ruin his support among the conservative majority that made up the town’s miniscule population, regardless of what popular opinion on the subject of sexuality might suggest. 

“Hey, now, what was that?” asks the stranger, wrapping thick fingers that are blistered in places around Len’s wrist. Somehow, the touch manages to be comforting more than it is restricting. “That was a flinch. Who’s hurting you, Snowflake?” 

Len pulls his wrist out of the man’s grip, and asks him again what he wants. 

“To know who’s hurting you.” demands the man. There are sooty fingerprints stark against Len’s skin, like bruises in their own way. 

“That’s none of your concern.” says Len, thinking of the broken bottle that will swing at Lisa if his father hears about this. 

“It is, if you’re mine.” Gravel, whiskey, bad decisions, soaring pleasures mixed with pain, promises that tone. 

“And I ain’t.”

“You could be. You want to be.” 

(Len wants to be).

“No I don’t.” 

Len walks away without an order. He’ll send Lisa out –

“Leonard.” snaps the stranger, and Len freezes.

“I never told you my name.” he tells the swing door to the kitchen, without turning around. 

“You never needed to.” offers the stranger. Len hears him approach in the creak of the bench seat in the booth, in the thump of his boots on linoleum floors, in the heat of him, seeping into Len’s back. 

“Why?” asks Len. 

“You know. You know, Lenny.” 

There’s a hand on the back of Len’s neck, turning him around, slowly, inexorably. He goes. 

“You know, Cold.” says the stranger, and kisses him. 

It’s a whirlwind, heat and passion and pressure. Len’s hands come up to frame the stranger’s face for a few fleeting seconds, and then migrate, one to wrap around the man’s bicep, the other to curl over his shoulder and around his back. The stranger leaves one hand on the back of Len’s neck, and lets the other slide to the small of Len’s back, pulling him closer until the heat of the stranger’s body is almost unbearable. 

-screams, flames, somebody running through the collapsing halls of a house, coughing from the smoke – 

The stranger moves the hand resting on the back of Len’s neck so he can scratch his fingers across Len’s scalp, and Len moans from the back of his throat and tips his head back to follow the touch. Hot lips skim down his throat, biting at soft skin in bursts of pain followed by rushes of cold. 

-cold, so cold, and there’s someone trying to pull him out, someone yelling, the sound of thrown punches, someone screaming his name with a voice hoarse from pain – 

And just like that, it’s all back, all righted in Len’s head, lifetime after lifetime of memories all in order and pressed neat. Memories of complex sigils and chants in forgotten tongues and monotones. Memories of the demon who called himself Cold, of the endless times they have bonded. Memories of the stranger, of the way he looked with his hands covered in blood, the way it dripped from those thick fingers, of the lust and affection that he felt with the sight. Memories of he himself, merciless and lethal with the pearl-handled switchblade he favored so. Memories of the fear they had instilled, of the deaths they had caused, of the thrill of it. Memories of the names they were given – Cold, the inhuman killer with the mind of a tactician, and Heatwave, the passionate arsonist who would follow him anywhere. Memories of their most recent deaths, of the irony of Len freezing as they held him under, of Mick letting himself burn as he burned those who had wronged them. 

Cold seeps under Len’s skin, and he feels like he’s home.

“Mick!” he gasps, and Mick raises his head from Len’s neck with a smile like a red sunrise – there’s nothing to it but warning of dangers to come. His eyes are black as pitch - he found Heatwave already.

“Welcome back, Snart.” says Mick, and pushes Len back until he’s slamming into the wall next to the swing door, before attempting to devour him whole. Mick’s hands are brands on Len’s hips, digging in, anchoring him to the here and now. Len shoves his hands up the back of Mick’s shirt, skims his fingers over the ridges of Mick’s scars, drags them back down again, letting his nails dig in. It makes Mick’s breath hitch, so he does it again, buries his face in Mick’s neck, bites down hard on the skin of his throat. Mick growls at that, wrenches Len back so he can kiss him, deep and long. Len lets him, and then drags him off by the back of his shirt. 

“Gasoline.” he says, identifying the smell that still clings to Mick’s clothes. “You burned them with gasoline, just like last time.”

“Didn’t get your daddy.” says Mick. Len must flinch again, because Mick’s eyes go from the lust-blown black he remembers from both this life and the last is suddenly overrun by anger. 

“It’s your daddy, the one who’s hurting you, isn’t it?” Mick demands. 

“He’s hurting Lisa.” Len admits, curling his hands around the muscle of Mick’s arms, letting his body rest back against the wall and enjoying the feel of his lover’s warmth and strength. 

“He won’t, ever again.” promises Mick. “You’re mine, and he will never touch you again.”

“Let him burn.” says Len, and smiles, letting Cold fill his eyes with black.

***  
Len finds Lisa washing dishes with the radio turned all the way up, elbow-deep in suds and grease. Her uniform is thin, and too short, and there are black circles under her eyes Mick has followed him back, zippo flicking on and off in his right. 

(Len remembers this like an old dance. Mick’s flame dancing, his own cold words and colder steel. They’ve done it for centuries. There should be a third.)

“Lenny-“ says Lisa, and its harder to tell what’s surprised her more, Mick’s presence, or the positively evil look on her brother’s face. 

“Lisey.” Len purrs. 

“Glider.” says Mick, deferential. There’s none of the dirty-dark in his voice when he speaks to Lisa or Glider – the embers are saved for temptation, for Len. Lisa looks between them for a mere handful of seconds, confused, before she’s shaking, head tipped back and eyes squeezed shut as Glider sashays home. The radio stops mid-song in order to give Lisa a downbeat and a theme as Glider opens her black-hole eyes. Glider has always been the more aesthetically focused of the three of them. 

“Heatwave.” She greets, warmly. There’s no need for her to acknowledge Len. Len will always be where Lisa is. She and Mick exchange the type of hug that occurs between two siblings who have been parted for so long they only remember the positives they miss, and none of the negatives that accompany close proximity. Len observes, and feels pleased. The song on the radio is “God’s Gonna Cut You Down”.

Almost, thinks Len. Almost correct. One word wrong. 

***  
Lewis Snart finds the sign turned to “closed” outside the diner when he arrives for his breakfast. The lights are off, the chairs stacked, and there is a small crowd of confused people milling about in the car park. 

There’s also a single stranger, a man, leaning against a motorcycle with out-of-state plates. There’s a canvas jacket tossed over the seat behind him, but out of deference to the summer heat that is seeping into the concrete even this early in the morning, he’s shed his shirt as well. His stance draws easy attention to the deep-flushed love bite where his jaw meets his neck, and flexes the right muscles in his back to emphasize the long pinked lines that someone’s nails have scored into them. He’s toying with a lighter, but there’s no cigarette in his mouth. He’s the very picture of sated contentment. Lewis stalks past him, towards the alley between the diner and the bank that sits behind it, and the employee entrance that opens onto it. 

“Don’t go into that alley.” cautions the stranger. Lewis tosses him a glare, and ignores the advice. He regrets that decision as soon as his children rise from the stoop before the door in eerie unison, when the pupils of their eyes spill over until their eyes are nothing but black. He regrets it when Len opens a pearl-handled switch-blade, and when Lisa seals the cuts with gold. He regrets it when he’s gasping for breath while the stranger douses him with gasoline. He regrets it when Lisa pouts prettily at the stranger and asks him if he can drop the match now. 

“Yes, Mick.” says Len, sliding into the stranger’s space, letting his fingers skim over the still visible love bite possessively. The stranger leans into the touch, curls his arm around Len’s waist and slides his hand under Len’s shirt, letting his fingers dig into the palm of the hand-shaped bruise the action reveals. “Drop the match.”

Lewis Snart dies screaming as he burns.  
***  
Sheriff Lance might not trust Len, who he still sees as the delinquent he used to drag to the cells again and again, but he does trust Lisa, who’s brought him his breakfast every day for years. So when the Snart siblings tell him they’d found a body in the back alley behind the diner, burned beyond recognition, it’s Lisa he asks for the details. The interview takes place at the counter of the otherwise-closed diner, both of them sipping from mugs of black coffee. The Sheriff’s eyeline over Lisa’s shoulder allows him to keep an eye on her brother, who’s sitting in a booth with the stranger who’d shown up the day before. They seem too caught up in each other to care about anything else, shoulders pressed close while they share the biggest plate of eggs and bacon the Sherriff’s ever seen. Len is eating bacon with his fingers, and the stranger catches his wrist, sucks the grease off them. Sheriff Lance turns away, feeling like he’s intruding. 

(He’d never admit it out loud, but he’s happy Len looks happy. Maybe he’ll cause less trouble. Lewis is going to hate it.)

They take the body in, go to run some DNA tests. It takes two days, two days during which Lewis never shows up for work, and the diner closes at 10:30pm and reopens at 7am. The stranger, who Sheriff Lance now knows as Mick, helps Len in the kitchen, the two of them always pressed into each other’s space without ever touching, and smokes on the front steps during his breaks. The sharp tang of nicotine is what greets Lance when he steps out of the cruiser bearing bad news. Perhaps it is fitting. The Snarts take the news of their father’s death rather stoically, as Lance had anticipated. Mick pulls Lisa close to him, letting her use his chest as a way to hide her reaction, while Len just stoically shakes Lance’s hand, and promises to come down to the station in a few days to sort out the pension payout. 

Lance swears he hears Lisa’s laughter as the diner door swings shut, high and fluting and more joyous than he can remember the woman ever having been. 

(Here is the deepest secret nobody knows: there are many more of them, of the black-eyed beings of myth and fabled lore. Cold and Heatwave and Glider, when they are together, act like something of a beacon. There are two who are trapped, blocked in by an overly righteous lawman three or four cycles ago, depending on who you ask, but they will return soon.)

They arrive in a slow progression over the next years. Canary first, perhaps because Canary has always been first. Sara Lance swaggers back into Central after college and wraps Oliver Queen around her little finger in a matter of minutes, easily cajoling him into marriage. The townspeople start to gossip immediately – they call Sara a whore, a wanton woman, up herself, overly educated. They say she’s pregnant, that she’s blackmailing Oliver, that she’s just trying to win her father’s favor, that she’s following in Laurel’s footsteps. The wedding, when it happens, is a huge, dramatic affair, partly because Oliver’s numerous exes include Sara’s older sister and the family drama is stifling, partly because the Queens still seem to think that the plantation makes them something special, places them above everyone else. Sara looks radiant in white, with her bouquet of orange roses and stargazer lilies. 

Not two days later, she shows up at the diner at 11pm, picks the lock on the door, and leans into the kitchen to demand a cherry milkshake off Len. Len doesn’t stop kissing Mick but rather lifts his hand off Mick’s ass for just long enough to flip her off from his seat on the kitchen bench, and Sara cackles with laughter as she takes a seat at the countertop in the diner proper. 

“Down in the lowly township so late, Mrs. Queen? Whatever will your husband think?” asks Lisa, who’s already halfway through making Sara’s shake. 

“My husband is asleep.” replies Sara, smiling slyly. Lisa places the tall glass and it’s thick straw down just to the side of Sara, so there’s plenty of space for Lisa to lean over the counter towards the blond. 

“And what will he say when he wakes?” asks Lisa, the words little more than puffs of air against Sara’s lips.

“Oh, my husband will be sleeping for … a while.” says Sara, in the same low whisper. Her eyes are like tar. All it takes is Lisa pushing herself onto her toes, and they are kissing, bent over a milkshake like a 50s power couple. The angle doesn’t allow for anything more than a relatively chaste press of lips, but that is alright for now (there will be time later, time for Sara to press Lisa up against the wall of the alley where they killed her father, time for slow, wet kisses in behind the counter after closing, time, time for something close to heretical in the carved pageantry of Queen mansion, time for all the dark passion that their kind desires). For now, Sara will take this, and with it Len’s obnoxious wolf-whistle and shit-eating smirk, Mick’s friendly clap on the back and proffered cigarette. 

The next morning, Sheriff Lance tries to interview his own daughter about the brutal murder of her husband, fails, and instead brings her to the diner for pancakes and coffee. Lisa serves them, and when the food arrives, there’s a stargazer lily on Sara’s saucer. A smile sneaks through her tears, and Sheriff Lance feels a little better for having brought his daughter here. Mick is coming in from another of his smoke breaks, and offers his condolences to young Ms. Lance. Sara gives him a watery smile as they leave. 

It’s not until later that Sheriff Lance will remember that the morning after Oliver Queen is found stabbed and burned in his own home, Mick Rory smells like gasoline. 

Then come the others. Hartley Rathaway, running like a Kerouac anti-hero from rich parent who couldn’t handle his sexuality, bringing with him Piper and his fantastic technological skills. Shawna Baez, Peek-a-boo, with her talents of going unnoticed and a cheerful face and open heart. Mardon comes in with the thunder and the lightning, Weather Wizard reveling in the pounding rain. Trickster seems indivisible from Axel Walker, who giggles like a fool as things explode and smiles constantly. And yet there are two more missing. 

(Len dreams of green eyes and a sunshine smile that hides wickedness. Lisa dreams of a mind that will shake the world. Mick dreams of trails of fire.)

***  
It’s all Barry’s fault. 

Cisco had been showing him around the mostly-abandoned cathedral that’s just down the road from their favorite coffee shop, which has cool architecture and cooler acoustics, hey Barry, listen to me sing over here – 

“Barry?”

“I’m over here!” comes Barry’s voice, bright and happy. “These paintings are just so beautiful.”

Cisco has spent a lot of time in this Cathedral. There are, to the best of his knowledge, no paintings in the building. He half-runs around the corner to find Barry walking down a corridor that he’s never seen before in his life. It’s made of a kind of grey stone that doesn’t match the rest of the building, and the walls –

Hung on the walls are oil paintings, beautiful scenes of tiny moments. The first is of frost creeping across a rippling river, slowly stilling its movements. The second is a match being struck, the sparks flying wild as the first stirrings of flame appear. The third is molten gold licking into a bullet mold. Opposite them hang a still life of a flute and a crowned skull, a lightning strike as it touches down on the earth, painted as though the viewer is lying on the ground staring up towards the clouds at an angle, and the barest glimpse of a woman’s silhouette caught in a mirror’s reflection. Barry stands opposite a fourth painting, next to the oil of the mirror, which depicts a blur of red, and yet still appears to be the running legs of a man, disappearing to the left of the painting. He’s not blinking, and Cisco is getting very worried, because passages he’s never seen before, made of the wrong kind of stone, with abstract concept oil paintings? Yeah, Cisco’s seen horror movies, he’s what TV Tropes would call “genre savvy”, and he knows that if they stay, shit’s gonna go down.

“Barry? We should probably get out of here.”

“Not yet.” says Barry, still sunshine-voiced, without looking away from the painting or blinking. “You haven’t seen yours.” 

With a blur of speed, Barry grabs Cisco and turns him by his shoulders so he’s facing the eighth painting on the wall. A blur of blue and black resolves itself into a wormhole, surrounded by tiny portrait images of people, places, things. 

He’s done this before, Cisco’s done this before. He remembers seeing through the worlds, remembers gold blurs and blood like ice, remembers flames of passion pulling him into warm arms for comfort. He remembers friendly rivalries and harmonizing, dancing in the humidity that came before a storm so the first drops would burst refreshing over sweat-brushed skin, laughing as a plan forms to create chaos and the sickly-sweet taste of cotton candy. And perhaps most of all, he remembers speed and sunshine and a soul like the pits of damnation. A smile like sugar and spice that revealed teeth stained with blood. He remembers –

“We need to break that stone.” says Cisco, pointing at the keystone of the bricked-up arch at the end of the corridor. Barry nods, and Cisco knows that he remembers too, even as Barry picks up the metal staff of a discarded flame torch from the floor and brings it down sharply on the keystone, again and again until it shatters and the wall crumples outwards with an almighty blast, like the shattered keystone had triggered an explosion behind the wall. Warmth curls around the top of Cisco’s spine, and he can feel Vibe’s presence in the back of his mind. A smile creeps on to his face as Barry turns to face him again, pitch-black eyes widening.

“Vibe.” he says, voice soft.

“Flash.” Cisco breathes.

They meet in the middle, a blur of energy and momentum, the unstoppable force without the immovable object, teeth and tongues and wet heat, surrounded by the rubble of their former prison. When they come up for air, Barry’s managed to lose his shirt, Cisco has a split lip that’s slowly welling up with red, and Barry’s collarbones are covered in tiny red bites. 

“We need to go to Central.” says Cisco.

“The others are there.” agrees Barry, and leans in to kiss the blood off Cisco’s lip. “Hotwire us a car?”

(In what used to be the largest guest bedroom in Queen Mansion, Len sits bolt upright from a dream and smirks. 

“They’re coming.” he tells Mick, in response to his lover’s questioning noise.)

***  
There’s a diner in Central – the only place you can get a coffee in this godforsaken hive of crime and villainy. The floors are blue linoleum, the booths bright crimson vinyl, the tables speckled white Formica, the neon lights are always flickering, and they make the best cherry milkshakes and the best apple pie this side of the Mason-Dixon line. The red “Open” light never goes out, and the tables are never empty, full of waves of gangs, bikers, petty thieves and criminals, con men and bank robbers, thugs and forgers. The man they owe their allegiance to works in the kitchen, but if you mean enough he will bring you your food with a cold smirk and cock his hip against your table while you swallow and find the right words to profess how you would follow him to the ends of the earth. His sister will greet you at the door and lead you to a free table, before returning to her post behind the counter, next to the jukebox and the milkshake machines with Oliver Queen’s blond widow (his blond murderer, ruthless and bold), the woman they call the White Canary, letting their fingers intertwine. Your server will either be a woman who appears next to your table without you ever seeing her approach, or a man with a smile like sunshine after rain, who nonetheless seems like he will break your neck at any second. Sometimes you’ll see the two other cooks – one with a grin like a lightning strike, one with a smile like the bloom of exploded C-4. Sitting at the end of the counter, drinking coffee and arguing over complex equations spreading over three, four, five napkins, pens fencing, are the man with the mind that shakes reality and the man with the mind that twists sound into a weapon. Outside, on the step, cigarette smoke curls to the heavens from between the blistered fingers of the right hand man, his huge frame folded into something that is merely intimidating rather than frightening. 

There’s a diner in Central, and when you open the door, you step into the realm of demons.


End file.
